The Art of the Start 2.0: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, or a not-for-profit leader, there's no shortage of advice on such topics as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact there are so many books, articles, and websites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis, or they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.

Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

Enchantment, as defined by bestselling business guru Guy Kawasaki, is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes the skeptics and cynics into the believers and the undecided into the loyal. Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high-level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

The Startup Checklist: 25 Steps to a Scalable, High-Growth Business

The Startup Checklist is the entrepreneur's essential companion. While most entrepreneurship books focus on strategy, this invaluable guide provides the concrete steps that will get your new business off to a strong start. You'll learn the ins and outs of startup execution, management, legal issues, and practical processes throughout the launch and growth phases and how to avoid the critical missteps that threaten the foundation of your business.

In Silicon Valley slang, a "bozo explosion" is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, "If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense"...then it's time for a reality check.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It

In this audio edition of the totally revised underground best seller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business, from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed.

How to Get and Stay Motivated

Want a blast of motivation to start your day strong? This audiobook offers over two hours of motivational tips broken down into quick, memorable 1-4 minute segments bound to set your head in a new direction. You'll get 100 nuggets of Grant Cardone motivational mojo as he inspires you to shoot for the extraordinary and never ever settle. With over 100 ways to stay motivated delivered to you by the dynamic Grant Cardone, you'll blast through any barriers and achieve your dreams.

Rework

With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who's ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs who want to get out, and artists who don't want to starve anymore will all find valuable inspiration and guidance in these pages. It's time to rework work.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

Most startups don't fail because they can't build a product. Most startups fail because they can't get traction. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die.

How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It

Using the greatest material from his popular Blog Maverick, Cuban has collected and updated his postings on business and life to provide a catalog of insider knowledge on what it takes to become a thriving entrepreneur. He tells his own rags-to-riches story of how he went from selling powdered milk and sleeping on friends' couches to owning his own company and becoming a multibillion-dollar success story.

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com

Amazon’s business model is deceptively simple: make online shopping so easy and convenient that customers won’t think twice. It can almost be summed up by the button on every page: Buy now with one click. Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder, whose business strategy and unique combination of character traits have driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world. Originally a computer nerd rather than a businessman, he had the vision to capitalize on the untapped online marketplace for bookselling....

Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

As each new generation of entrepreneurs emerges, there is a renewed interest in how venture capital deals come together. Yet there really is no definitive guide to venture capital deals. Nobody understands this better than authors Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. For more than seventeen years, they've been involved in hundreds of venture capital financings, and now, with Venture Deals, they share their experiences in this field with you.

Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal

When it comes to delivering a pitch, Oren Klaff has unparalleled credentials. Over the past 13 years, he has used his one-of-a-kind method to raise more than $400 million - and now, for the first time, he describes his formula to help you deliver a winning pitch in any business situation. Whether you’re selling ideas to investors, pitching a client for new business, or even negotiating for a higher salary, Pitch Anything will transform the way you position your ideas. According to Klaff, creating and presenting a great pitch isn’t an art - it’s a simple science.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Expanded and Updated)

This expanded edition includes dozens of practical tips and case studies from readers who have doubled their income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book. Also included are templates for eliminating email and negotiating with bosses and clients, how to apply lifestyle principles in unpredictable economic times, and the latest tools, tricks, and shortcuts for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either.

Made to Stick

Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas (business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others) struggle to make their ideas "stick". In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds draw their power from the same six traits.

Publisher's Summary

What does it take to turn ideas into action? What are the elements of a perfect pitch? How do you win the war for talent? How do you establish a brand without bucks? These are some of the issues everyone faces when starting or revitalizing any undertaking, and Guy Kawasaki, former marketing maven of Apple Computer, provides the answers.

The Art of the Start will give you the essential steps to launch great products, services, and companies - whether you are dreaming of starting the next Microsoft or a not-for-profit that's going to change the world. It also shows managers how to unleash entrepreneurial thinking at established companies, helping them foster the pluck and creativity that their businesses need to stay ahead of the pack.

Kawasaki provides readers with GIST - Great Ideas for Starting Things - including his field-tested insider's techniques for bootstrapping, branding, networking, recruiting, pitching, rainmaking, and, most important in this fickle consumer climate, building buzz.

At Apple, Kawasaki helped turn ordinary customers into fanatics. As founder and CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, he has tested his iconoclastic ideas on real-world start-ups. And as an irrepressible columnist for Forbes, he has honed his best thinking about The Art of the Start.

What the Critics Say

"Kawasaki covers the basics in an effectively casual tone." (Publishers Weekly)"His newest work addresses entrepreneurs who want to grow beyond being a company of one as well as innovators who work for large companies." (Library Journal)

Kawasaki's principles are fantastic. I went out and bought the book, perhaps a better format with all the lists and references. But, was the narrator a real person or was it text-to-speech software? That perfectly dispassionate monotone actually sounded computer-generated. Impossible to enjoy.

The ideal reader of this book would be someone thinking of beginning a startup. It's not just for anyone, and it's not about "starting anything" like the tagline says. The book is full of nuggets of advice, with a no-nonsense, confident delivery, and a touch of sense of humor. I think Guy Kawasaki is legit, and you get a sense that he really has "been there" and is just giving you all the advice he can give. Audio format is probably not the best for this book, since there is a lot of tabulated content that starts sounding very tedious after a while. I did enjoy the part on "how to hire someone" and the concept of bootstrapping a company. A lot of misconceptions get clarified, and it gives a good idea of the attitude and expectations one should have when starting a business venture.

This has some really amazing information in it from someone who apparently knows what he is talking about.

The voice actor/robot almost destroys about 20% of the content by not speaking like a human. There is one chapter that I still don't understand at all. It sounds like a bunch of words being read off a spec sheet as if they were structured in a paragraph. The physical book may be a better bet.

The book is full of good startup/entrepreneurial advice, but it loses some of its impact without Kawasaki's presentation style. The narrator is OK, but not nearly dynamic enough for the topic. There are several of Kawasaki's presentations on YouTube so if you haven't heard him talk, check out the videos before you buy this book. If you like the videos, the book is just more of that. If you don't like the videos, you won't like the book.

I wish this book had been available when I started my company. Kawasaki gives sound advice. Many points of advice he gives I had to learn the hard way, by doing them wrong at first. Anyone who is thinking of starting a company should read this book.

If you have been jn the game for a while, you may find this book redundant. If you are interested in entering the game and want to be entrepreneur, raise money, particularly the Silicon Valley way, this is an excellent guide.